The Undertaker

“Excuse me for being blunt, but I'm HR. I knew you had been out of work for quite some time in Los Angeles, so what could you possibly have been working on with this man? And he said he was calling from California.”

“California?”

“Yes, but we have Caller ID on all the incoming lines and the display showed the call was from a local Boston number. That's why it didn't seem right. And then the Boston Police started calling this afternoon, asking if we knew where you were.”

“You did the right thing,” I reassured her. “Tell the office staff, if they get any more calls from that guy, they should play dumb. You haven't heard from me, you haven't talked to me, and you don't have a clue where I am. But if you can, get them on tape.”

“Are you coming back? Can you help?”

“I'm going to try. I'm in Amarillo, Texas. If I can, I'll call you again tomorrow.”

After I hung up, I stayed in the phone booth for a long minute, playing the “what-ifs” back to myself. As usual, I came up with more questions, but not very many answers. What I did know was that we had to get to Boston and we had to be careful.

The rest of the drive across southern Michigan was uneventful. I took the wheel for the second half of the trip. We took it slow and stopped for coffee and a late lunch before we hit Toledo at 6:30 PM. There wasn't much traffic by that time. What there was, was all leaving town, not going in. That made it easy to find the train station. It was a big, neo-classic building named Union Station, like most other downtown train stations in the Midwest. It was south of the tall buildings, down on the river. We circled it twice, staying a full block away. All we saw was a cop car parked near a donut shop, no SWAT Teams or ugly sedans with black-walled tires were lurking nearby.

“Drop me at the front door,” Sandy said. “I'll look around the waiting room.” She could tell I didn't look very happy at that thought. “You're something else, Talbott.” She pulled the blond wig from her shoulder bag. In seconds the transformation was complete. “We need to know, and it's better to find out now than later. If I come running back out, you'll know it was a really bad idea.”

It did not take more than three minutes before she came strolling back out and hopped in the car, holding a newspaper in her hand. “Unless they're disguised as bored ticket agents, a very old black porter, or a couple of really gross homeless guys laying a bench in the back corner, nobody's home. Let's go.”

As I drove away, she opened the newspaper. It was the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She flipped through the pages in the first section. “Oops!” she said. “We made the AP wire.”

I pulled over to the side of the street and read the story over her shoulder. It was inside, on Page 4, but they had the photo from my California driver's license next to the story. Nothing makes you look more like a perp than one of those. I made a mental note to cross Arnold Schwarzenegger off my Christmas card list.

TWO WANTED IN MIDWEST CRIME SPREE

Chicago. Chicago Police joined a three-state manhunt for a modern-day, Bonnie and Clyde. Following a high-speed chase through the south side this morning, two police officers were seriously injured when the pair shot their way through a roadblock at 35th Street creating havoc on the Dan Ryan Expressway. They escaped north on an El train and disappeared in the Chicago Loop. A large manhunt is continuing downtown and police sources consider both suspects armed and dangerous.

The pair are believed to have escaped with the help of the Disciples, a notorious south side street gang. CPD Gang Intelligence says the two white fugitives may be major players in an interstate drug trafficking syndicate from the west coast believed to be muscling its way into the Chicago rackets with the help of a Columbian cocaine cartel.